In a model where firms face a continuous choice of how much to invest in environmental innovation, we show that an ever stricter environmental policy does not always lead to ever cleaner production methods and ever lower production of polluting goods. It does so when the abatement technology is...

Social norms and intrinsic motivations lead to environmentally friendly behaviour even in the absence of environmental policy. This paper looks at the interactions of social norms and environmental regulation in their impact on individual behaviour. People obtain social rewards for voluntary...

We analyse how state university competition to collect resources may affect both research and the quality of teaching. By considering a set-up where two state universities behave strategically, we model their interaction with potential students as a sequential noncooperative game. We show that...

We explore the determinants and effects of trust relationships between upstream suppliers and downstream producers. Using unique survey data on individual supplier-buyer relationships in the German automotive industry, we show, by means of different measures of supplier-buyer trust, that higher...

This paper introduces the concept of emotions into the standard litigation contest. Positive (negative) emotions emerge when litigants win (lose) at trial and are dependent in particular on the level of defendant fault. Our findings establish that standard results of litigation contests change...

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that...

This study is an empirical investigation of theoretical predictions concerning the impact of bank competition on bank risk and asset allocations. Recent work (Boyd, De Nicolò and Jalal, 2009, BDNJ henceforth) predicts that as competition in banking increases, the loan-to-asset ratio will rise...

In higher education pure credit market funding leads to underinvestment while income-contingent loans funding tends to produce overinvestment. We analyze whether a market structure in which both funding schemes coexist and compete against each other might restore efficiency of the educational...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...